Scholar Uprising

Devlog Week 6 - We Lied about the Dashing

Greetings, O' itch.io lurkers. This week we have some changes to the core mechanics of our game. We figured this out after consulting with our 2D Game Programming professor, who also happens to own his own game studio. Needless to say, he's much more experienced in pointing out what works and what doesn't in a game, and we listened to a lot of his feedback. This brings us to that clickbaiting headline.

Originally, the dash was meant to help players traverse the vertical level design, which we thought would be counter-intuitive to our goal of creating a vertical platformer. However, after testing our game with a dash function, we found out that traversing vertically with a dash ability helps to keep the game fresh and controls tight. It doesn't really betray our goal, but it rather helps in making a more enjoyable experience. So... our boy Kribo will have these as his core mechanics;

Chaining Jumps and Dashes

Last week, we spoiled that the simple act of jumping also provides our favourite troublemaker with offense skywards. Not only that, but if you hit a target, you'll be able to jump again! This week, we decided to give the same ability to our character, but sideways. This helps our character reach platforms that you might have slightly missed, and it gives the players some options to quickly dispatch foes which are on the same ground level. This creates a better game flow, and making long chains of jumps and dashes becomes very satisfying.

Our target goals

Keeping our milestones simple, we want to work on simpler tasks, especially since we ARE college students with mid-term examinations coming up. In fact, next week we would be swamped with our mid-term tests! Our goal would be to adjust the proper animations, and successfully create enemies which can shoot projectiles! If we can do so and control how often and to which directions, we should be able to create interesting enemy types.